> trying to do anything live with a DAW is next to impossible due to latency issues. It takes a little effort (and sometimes money), but you can definitely ge

> trying to do anything live with a DAW is next to impossible due to latency issues. It takes a little effort (and sometimes money), but you can definitely get latency low enough to be able to use the DAW live. Consider that almost every electronic artist playing music on stage today is using Ableton Live. The basic components are: 1. Make sure your OS's drivers aren't introducing too much latency. I hear horror stories about the default audio drivers on Windows but as a Mac user I've never had to worry about this. 2. Make the buffer size small in your DAW. DAWs process audio a block of samples at a time because it's much kinder to the CPU's cache and gives you better overall throughput. But chunking obviously adds latency because you don't hear a single sample from the buffer until the entire buffer is done. Controlling the buffer size lets you make the latency/performance trade-off wherever you want. At a 48k sample rate, each sample is ~0.02 milliseconds long. So a buffer size of 1,024 adds 21ms of latency, which is low enough for doing things like tweaking effects and arranging live, but high enough that you will definitely notice it if you're playing individual notes on an instrument. Dropping the buffer size down to 128 gets you down to ~2.6ms of latency, which is essentially unnoticeable. 3. Make sure your audio interface doesn't introduce too much latency. You can find sites that measure this precisely. My experience on my Mac is that even my cheap Focusrite audio interface is low enough to work fine. If you really get into this, you can spend extra money and get interfaces with lower latency.